Sticking it to the man or sticking up for the consumer? I'll let you be the judge. Nicholas Merrill is creating a new non-profit ISP which he describes as a "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption." His goal is to create a system that is so encrypted that not even the ISP itself can snoop on its customers.

The system, theoretically, could make it impossible for the ISP to respond to copyright infringement requests or authority requests. You may ask how is this legal. Well, according to Merrill, it depends on a provision in a 1994 federal law called CALEA. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act makes sure that ISPs are not held responsible for decrypting data if they don't have the information to do so.

If Mr. Merrill creates the service properly, not even the ISP would know what's going on in the system. This would allow them to operate directly under the protection of the CALEA law. Merrill dealt with the government and FBI in a legal battle for 6 years over his NYC ISP. That caused him to come up with this plan to protect himself and his users. He is attempting to raise $2 million in the next couple of weeks before the service launches.

Good old Google Chrome. It's the browser I'm using to write this right now. Unfortunately, I have to open tabs manually across all of my computers and that's quite annoying. However, I no longer have to as in the latest Google Chrome beta, it includes a new feature which syncs your tabs across all of your Chrome installs.

The feature doesn't actually keep the same tabs open across computers. Instead it adds an "Other Devices" menu on the new tab page in which you can select a tab from another computer or even Android device. And it doesn't just come with the single tab--it brings the full history of the tab so that you can go backwards.

There's no word when this will be available in the regular Chrome release, but you can check it out in the developer channel here.

While Internet Explorer may not be winning any awards for being the most feature-filled or quickest browser around, it is winning accolade from one user for giving his aging desktop replacement notebook the best battery life. User Ciprian Adrian Rusen put IE9, IE10, Chrome 18, Firefox 11 and Opera 11.62 to the test and found that both IEs lasted longer.

His machine is a two and a half year old HP Pavilion dv7 2185dx with a 2GHz Core 2 Quad Q9000, a Radeon HD 4650 and 6GB of DDR2 RAM. Not exactly a power friendly configuration! Many like to use Chrome for its minimalist design--I'm using it right now--but it is pretty clear that it likes to use power in exchange for its snappiness.

Chrome was 126% faster than IE10 but yielded only 85 minutes of run time whereas IE10 ran for 108 minutes. However, since IE10 had to be ran on Windows 8, some of these power savings could be attributed to Windows 8. Microsoft has been touting that Windows 8 is more energy efficient. If you're going for battery life, it looks like the best choice is IE10.

Ruse noted that there isn't a parallel between performance and longevity: "Peacekeeper runs its tests in a loop until the battery dies. The browsers which lasted longer went through more test loops, not fewer. For example, Chrome went through 17 iterations while Internet Explorer went through 23. The tests do not take less or more depending on the browser."

The Dev channel has been updated to 19.0.1084.9 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. This build contains following updates:

Updated V8 - 3.9.24.7

Fixed issues: 120519, 120978, 120430, 120193

Full details about what changes are in this build are available in the SVN revision log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

You can read more about Google Chrome releases, and download them, here.

Windows 8 is coming, its kind of like the monster under your bed, you know its there, you're trying to prepare for it and one day, it's going to get you. Windows 8 is going to do the same, it's going to captivate so many more people, with its blend of powerful full-featured OS, but also touch-screen friendly. Mozilla has been getting cuddly with Windows 8 and its Metro interface, and now we have a tease of Firefox for Windows 8.

It looks quite basic at the moment, I really thought the user interface would be well on its way, but hey, it's early days yet. Mozilla only announced the development of a Metro-style Firefox back in February, so it'll be a while before the foundation is properly set and things are locked into place.

Firefox for Windows 8 is based on the Fennec XUL code, and the project's already started intergrating with the live tile flavor of Windows 8, implementing HTML file input controls, snap for managing multiple running apps, in addition to search and share contacts. We should expect a beta release in the coming months, and the full release close to the launch of Windows 8 itself.

We have reported previously about how Chrome passed Internet Explorer in market share for a couple of days, but it seems as though Microsoft has turned the browser around and gained some market share back. The results from Net applications regarding March usage show an increase in Internet Explorers use with a matching decrease in FireFox and Chrome.

IE's usage share climbed from 51.9% to 53.8% whereas FireFox went from 21.8% to 20.6% and Chrome from 19.1% to 18.6%. Safari saw a microscopic jump in usage, amounting to about 0.1% increase ending at 5.07%. It's clear that Internet Explorer is still down from where it used to be, but Microsoft has done some good things from IE8 to IE9.

However, once you jump ship to another browser, it's near impossible to go back. It is worth it to check out Internet Explorer, however, because it seems as though it has done a lot of things right. Tell me, which browser do you use?